CloudShare Blog

CloudShare Introduces – Multiple Machine Resume and more

By Danielle Arad - December 11, 2011

It’s release day. For this release I was in the Israel office (read “meet the team”), and I must admit, I was disappointed. Release day is not as I picture it from the US office. I generally expect that all the developers are running around the office, screaming, and slamming doors. Instead it’s a calm push of a button, validation, and onto coding for the next release.

In any case, what is not disappointing is what ends up in each release. Let’s see, what do I get to tell you about today:

Per Machine Ready: Is a term we use to mean that during environment resume of multiple machines, you are able to view a machine that resumes before another. This new feature allows you to start working on available virtual machines before the entire environment is prepared. You will notice that all virtual machines in the environment will now have their own preparation percentage. When it hits 100% the machine is ready to view. Keep in mind, depending on your environment configuration certain machines, for example in a domain situation, even though ready to view rely on resources of another machine.

Performance: Two major points of focus in performance this release. Really performance should be old news to you by now, as we are always looking for ways to increase the efficiency of our platform. There are five types of performance with CloudShare. First is the performance of the user interface, second the performance of resuming your environments, third the performance of accessing your machines ( via RDP for example ), fourth the performance of the virtual machine itself, and fifth the performance of your environments network. In this release we addressed performance of resume, and accessing the machine.

The first is something we address in every release, we changed components of our automation, and memory to make the time and consistency of environment resume better. The second is addressing one popular way of accessing machines, the performance of Web Access. If you are not already using it, web access is the feature that allows you to share your machines without giving direct access. If your machines contain a web application such as SharePoint, you can offer a static URL to people to view what you have created. When recipients grab this URL they will be able to view the machines web application at ports 80, 3695 ( SharePoint Central Admin ), 8080 ( SharePoint MySites), and 443. Not only that if your environment is suspended they will be able to resume the machine without having access to your ProPlus account. A very cool and popular feature. To make this feature possible we have an advanced layer of technology that watches the web request. What we did in this release is make that technology even more efficient so the latency of the web request to the machine is shorter.

As is now tradition, it is the second post of its type after all, I will now tell you a little about what is coming. But before I do, let me ask you. Do you want to be apart of the evolution of ProPlus? If so join our Hall at http://www.hall.com/CloudShare. It’s a casual place outside of CloudShare to have a conversation and share your feedback via regularly created small surveys and conversation board. So what can you expect to come in the next few releases?

– New way to access machines on Mac and iOS devices – More web access performance enhancements – Ability to revert individual machines from snapshot

The next release is 12/24/2011, so stay tuned!

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